Lecesne's "Mouth' has plenty to say

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, October 4, 1995

JAMES LECESNE doesn't just perform characters, he channels them. That's the impression he gives with his instantaneous transformations in "Word of Mouth," which opened Tuesday in the Solo Mio Festival at the Bayfront Theater. It's also the format and connecting theme of his remarkable solo show.

With a shift of stance, an adjustment of shoulders, hips and the angle of his head, and a modulation of his astonishingly versatile voice, he's three members of a New York Italian family - young and old, male and female - and a Jewish neighbor, in a rapid cross-fire of back-and-forth conversations. Add a strategic wig, shawl or baseball cap, and he's a man or woman inhabiting a completely separate class or cultural reality.

Subtitled "The Story of a Human Satellite Dish,"

"Mouth" opened in New York in 1993, moving up from the Home for Contemporary Theater to an off-Broadway run at the Promenade, produced by Mike Nichols and Elaine May. It not only won Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards, it even copped an Oscar (Best Live Action Short for

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"Trevor," based on one of the show's character sketches). It plays here for only four more performances, Thursday through Sunday - which isn't enough.

Pinpoint-perfect characterizations are only part of the reason for the show's success. Lecesne (pronounced

"Leh-seen" ) is one of those actors - like Danny Hoch, whose "Some People" was the hit of last year's Solo Mio - who seems capable of populating an entire city. He subsumes himself entirely within his personas, bringing them to life with subtle nuances of tone and gesture.

But he's also an engaging writer with a keen ear for different rhythms of speech and twists of logic. And he and director Eve Ensler have fashioned an engrossing 75-minute show that moves like quicksilver. Bradley Wester's white-on-white set - only the metallic innards of a radio stand out from the white chairs, backdrop and tables - is a superbly neutral palette, continually transformed by Kate Boyd's structural spotlights and the music and ambient noise of Raymond Schilke's sound design.

The radio is the visual symbol for Lecesne's channeling theme. In the first sketch - a recurring story that becomes the show's engaging framework - a young Italo-American named Frankie, searching for contact with the father who deserted the family long ago, begins to pick up the voices of dead neighbors on the radio. The house immediately fills up with widows seeking word from their departed husbands.

In lightning-quick character changes, Frankie and his brassy, opinionated, discontented mother Josie - a former Miss Coney Island - battle and bicker over everything from family memory to Frankie's growing independence and the impact of his channeling business on her back-porch beauty parlor operation. Fast, frantic and tellingly funny, the family scenes highlight and subtly reflect upon the four other character sketches.

Everybody is searching for some form of contact beyond the grave. An imposing elderly women, with a Katharine Hepburn quaver and bearing, talks of her inability to adjust to life in Africa and hopes to communicate with her dead husband, casually conversing with a deceased servant all the while. Shirley, a timid but determined Appalachian woman, travels all over the world searching out Blessed Virgin Mary appearances in hopes of curing her dying daughter.

Brian, an uneducated Englishman, sits in a hospital waiting room while his wife undergoes chemotherapy, then takes a job in the hospital after her death to remain close to her. Seeking a spiritual connection, he plans a trip to India, where there are more gods.

Trevor, whose story became the movie, is a persecuted gay teen who comes out of the other side of a suicide attempt with more hopeful connections than the other characters realize. Lecesne takes him from childhood to incipient manhood by beautifully nuanced degrees.

"The point is," as Frankie eagerly explains his evolving cosmology, "that every particle in the universe touches every other particle. You get connected. Not like me and my mother. That's not connected. That's blood. Connected like, y'know, dust." From such connections, Lecesne has created a brilliant show.